If you had to guess, who do you think has accounted for more box office revenue than any other movie star? The answer, somewhat unsurprisingly, is Samuel L. Jackson, a man in both the Star Wars and Marvel universes. The second highest? Warwick Davis. With apologies to the Willow-hive, it seems unlikely that these are the two biggest movie stars in the world. So, that raises the question, who is?
Code and more detailed explanation of all statistics can be found here.
The biggest movie star right now
How can you quantify movie stardom? Is it box office revenue over the last few years? Is it social media presence? It it some intangible magnetism? George Clooney’s box office numbers aren’t that impressive relative to his contemporaries, but if you watch a few seconds from an interview with him, his movie stardom is undeniable.
For the purposes of this article, we’re going to focus on an individual actor’s box office performance. Rather than looking at raw box office performance however, we’ll make a few basic assumptions in order to more closely approximate our tacit understanding of movie stardom*:
Actors who are higher on the call sheet should get more credit for the success or failure of a movie
More recent movies should be weighted more heavily than older ones when calculating movie stardom for any moment in time
Roles in franchise content should be less heavily weighted than roles in original movies, since for franchises, it is the franchises themselves that are at least in part, what audiences are showing up for
*For additional detail, there’s a statistical limitations section at the end of the article
To control for the first, we can simply divide box office results by billing order. So, if a movie makes $100, and The Rock is first on the call sheet, The Rock gets 100 points. Number two on the call sheet gets 50 points, and so on down the line (sorry Kevin Hart). This isn’t a perfect solution as there are many instances where there is more than one lead, but with the amount of data we’re dealing with (525 809 movies dating back to 1874, yes Passage de Venus is in the dataset), we have to implement some useful heuristics.
To control for the second, we can use what is called an Exponentially Weighted Moving Average (EWM), which means that we take a sliding 10 year window and average a star’s box office performance over that ten years, with more recent entries getting more weight in the average than older ones. So if you had a hit last year, it counts more towards your current star power than if you had one two years ago.
If we control for just these first two, you get the below horse race (on mobile, I would recommend full screen landscape mode),
As you can see, our winner, is Mr. Mark Sinclair, otherwise known as Vin Diesel. However, the main thing that this plot illustrates is the impact of IP on the box office, as a close examination reveals that the star of a major franchise has held the top spot for a significant portion of the time since the release of Dr. No in 1962.
So, what happens if we control for our third assumption and remove franchises from the picture? Again, completely removing franchises is not entirely fair as there are countless star-driven franchises that people show up for because of the franchise lead like Mission Impossible, where people show up to see how Tom Cruise will next taunt death. Similarly, even within major franchises like The MCU, movies like Iron Man are more star driven than something like The Eternals. However, rules is rules, and again, we’re really just looking for useful heuristics here.
As you can see, quite a different picture emerges. The early part of the horse race looks similar to the one above, but in the 80’s we no longer see Harrison Ford dominating. Instead, in the first half of the decade we see Dustin Hoffman, who amassed mega-hits like Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) and Tootsie (1982) — ah, what a time — and in the latter half we see jockeying for position between folks that I, as an early 90’s VHS baby, think of when I think of movie stars: Tom Cruise, Kevin Costner, Julia Roberts, and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
At the turn of the millennium we see the ascension of Bruce Willis and Adam Sandler, followed by a five year streak for Leo from 2011 to 2016 where he had a run of Shutter Island (2009), Inception (2010), J. Edgar (2011), Django Unchained (2012), The Great Gatsby (2013), The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), and to wrap it up, a best actor win for The Revenant (2015), a great movie despite what the edge lords of film Twitter would have you believe. We then see Matt Damon, Bradley Cooper, Will Smith, and Tom Hanks.
Our winner, however, of the non-IP horse race is, Jia Ling! She may not yet be a household name in North America, but I assure you, her current run is staggering. It really kicked off in 2021, when she made the super-mega-giant hit Hi, Mom, an original comedy that grossed nearly a $1B globally (see the last article here for some historical context on how exceptional this is). She followed it up with Embrace Again (2021), which made roughly $150M, and YOLO (2024), which grossed nearly $500M just this year. Beyond the fact that she stars in these movies, she also writes and directs them. Although she is not yet a household name in North America, it is Jia Ling, who is likely the most significant individual force globally at the box office today.
Statistical Limitations
The statistics here are relatively surface level, but illustrative of broad trends in movie stardom. Some of the key limitations are:
It would probably be more statistically sound to control for the quality of the movie. If, for example, people show up to a bad movie that stars a big actor, it could be because of that actor rather than the quality of the movie
A future article will look at substitution value, which is a metric that predicts how much money a movie would have made had another actor been substituted into the lead role, given the stars’ box office power at the time. For example, if Brad Pitt played Will Smith’s character in I Am Legend, what would the predicted impact of that be at the box office?
The box office decay used to penalize people who aren’t the “stars” of the movie was likely too harsh, perhaps a logarithmic decay would have been more reasonable
Next up
If you have any ideas for future articles let me know. The next few articles in the queue are:
Who is the biggest movie star in the world?What type of horror movies make the most money?
How to make a successful movie: A causal analysis
Statistically speaking, who should play James Bond next?
Is "Substitution Value" like the movie version of the WAR metric?? Hope so.
I did not realize that about Jia Ling, that's a pretty big deal. Beyond that, one factor I think is significant is ROI. Because we live in a movie culture where a movie can make $150-$200 million domestic and still be a flop because the studio invested far too much in who THEY thought was a star. Whereas almost nobody loses money when they bankroll a Jason Statham movie.
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